My bike has developed a electrical fault,the lights wont work most of the time and if they do work then the indicators stop working so does the nautral light and there seems to be a clicking sound coming from around the battery area some times I know sod all about electrics so im loth to mess with em does any one have any idea what this could be ?.

Regards Ford

Electric faults often seem like hte hardest things in the world to get sorted simply becasue there's no real obvious plavce to start.

However, you should start at the basics.

Make sure your battery has a full charge. Quite often as the weather turns cooler it seems to bring out a flush of knackered batteries.

check your fuses and replace seeing as they are just a few pence each.

99% of the time it's cured

Buy yourself a continuity tester and start testing and cleaning every electrical connection and test each long part of loom to make sure there are no breaks in the cable, horrible process i know !

And as an adendum to the above get a meter....

The best way to look for faulty connections isn't the most obvious way (the ohms setting). Use the lowest voltage setting. It's called 'voltage drop'.

Lets say you've got a simple circuit that I'll attempt to make here:

( B )---**---(L)--- ^

\

^

The (B)attery goes to ground (^), goes through a connector (**) to a (L)amp, and to ground (^)

If you wanted to test the connector, you'd think you'd use the ohm setting across it - but that's not very accurate in a real world test.

What you'd do is load up the circuit (turn on the lamp!), then using the voltage setting, go ACROSS the terminal with the probes (you'd think it would be shorting the meter, but it's not) and look for voltage.

IF you see 0.00V on the meter, the connection is perfect. Anything above that is an indication of a voltage drop. If you saw 1.20V volts on the meter, that much power is being 'lost' to the lamp. This is usually due to corrosion, a bad crimp, etc. Funny thing is, if you used an ohm meter on it with the power off, chance are it'd read 0 ohms and you'd think it was fine! But under load, things change....

Start at the battery (remove the terminals and clean them both, both sides). Now just follow the circuit through to the item that's not working. Think of it as plumbing, and follow the flow of the 'pipes'.

Hope that long ramble helps and doesn't further confuse! It's really all quite simple when you shake it out.

Many thanks for all the help every one I will have ago at it at the weekend

Thanks

Ford

any joy Ford ?